Wednesday, May 11, 2016

I've been arguing for long that Manuel Valls and his support base at the French PS are true fascists. I admit that, as Basque, I have a vantage point, knowing well the ilk of Valls, who used to be in charge of police, just like Sarkozy, via his repression against my People.

But now it is apparent before all the French: he has dared to appeal to a seldom-used constitutional article by which he commits his much hated "labor reform" to his own continuity as Prime Minister, forcing the National Assembly to win a motion of no-confidence against him if they want to stop the law. He's not just challenging Parliament but he's challenging nearly every French, many of which have been for a month already protesting in the streets against his outrageous "banana republic" labor project that takes as model a Spain with more than 20% unemployement and below-survival salaries.

This kind of anti-democratic tricks of which the V Republic is full of are owed to the sometimes praised General De Gaulle, the Franco-light of France. As all authoritarian figures, De Gaulle did not like democracy too much, so he made a very authoritarian constitution to fit his ambition. Oddly enough this constitution survived him, deposed by the 1968 quasi-revolution, and has arrived to our times untouched. Obviously it is quite dated, because it embraces an authoritarian scheme of things that is simply inviable under Toyotism, much less in the era of Internet.